Someone Likes Looking At My Feet

My Shiny New Toy
Originally uploaded by donXfive.

With 52 individual views (not including my own), this is now the second-most-viewed photo on my Flickr account.

When Meat Goes Bad

Cast comes off one week from today.

Had a major kitchen problem yesterday -- major by my standards anyway: the beef roast I'd put in the fridge (last week) to defrost had gone borderline bad, but also leaked a bunch of blood/juice all over the bottom shelf of my fridge. All sorts of veggies got leaked on (the outside of the bags anyway) so I had a ton of cleanup to do. I cooked that other pork tenderloin while all this was going on, had that with a salad and some broccoli. Looks like I am back under the gun in terms of eating the food before it spoils, since I also had to toss a few bell peppers and some bags of salad (granted, salad goes bad pretty fast) -- the meat I re-froze, to keep it from spoiling in the garbage can before trash day.

In other news, I got to read a translation of that Gospel of Judas they just found. Interesting, but I think the consensus is right: the theological implications are probably pretty small.

Updating Early This Weekend

Just a little catch-up:

Friday night I went out to Which Brew, had dinner and hung out with a few friends.

Saturday I went to the gym, went home and watched the snow, then with the help of Greg's wife Judy I got some shopping & laundry/drycleaning done. I also picked her brain about my short- and medium-term foot prospects (she's a physical therapist, though her experience differs somewhat from the kind of therapy I'll be getting). What she said didn't quite give me the warm fuzzies, but it was good to hear. Basically, I will have quite a bit of trouble with my foot for a while, until tendons re-stretch -- she expects therapy for this to be very painful -- and muscle atrophy will not only affect leg strength, but the atrophy of the little muscles (proprioceptors? -- or whatever she said) will mean problems with balance for a while. When can I start biking and running? She would only say "it depends."

Meantime, my foot feels pretty good, and I've been moving it around a little inside the cast, at least partly to get a jump-start on recovery. I asked her about this too, she said I was probably OK as long as it didn't hurt, but she didn't look enthusiastic. I'm going to do it anyway, since it's the only way to scratch some of the itches under the cast.

Anyway, it was a good productive afternoon -- especially since I'd originally planned to take a nap -- and now I've been the first to see their new boat, and their new kitchen floor. I also got the scoop on flight delays for the Moab trekkers, since Greg called with an update. (I'd talked earlier to Doug & Lori who were driving out: they were making good time, drove through the first night and were in Kansas when I called.)

After that I got two calls: Hans was back in PA for a few days, called to let me know he would be down at Which Brew with his brother, and Joe C said that they would also be down there. Took a taxi, driver told me he'd had a broken ankle once, but the pins broke and they had to re-do it. Gulp! He dropped me at Which Brew with a "good luck!" and I went in, ate dinner, hung out with my friends, deja vu yadda yadda...

Skin: Much better this past week. I've been using that Vaseline Advanced Healing (aka "friggin' liquid wax"), as well as a slightly different bath treatment (it has mineral oil in it, as well as colloidal oatmeal) and a more aggressive use of cortisone cream, and it's been like a miracle cure. Skin's still kind of pinkish-red in areas, but not that inflamed stuff; bleeding has stopped and so has the itching (for the most part). The skincare regimen may have been a big factor, but I think that the rise in temperature and humidity is helping too, and also the extra sunlight and fresh air as I sit on the porch after work.

I'm off to sit on the porch, maybe walk around the block or something, then Mom & Dad are coming up to take me to dinner -- it's my forty-third birthday today!

You're Living In Your Own Private Finest Hour

Had a weird dream last night. Dreamt I was back home (Englishtown); part of it was hanging out at the Humphrey's, or rather on the front lawn, sitting in lawn furniture by a campfire, over near that house next door to them that was always unoccupied, with Peter Humphrey and a bunch of other people, then I was over at the entrance to St. Thomas Moore Church, which wasn't a church but maybe a school or hospital -- I think there was a gymnastic competition going on -- and I got into an altercation with some dudes in a car who came to pick me up, decided to walk home but I left my crutches in the car, and then I was jogging (with my cast) along Jamestown Drive, and then I was back at the campfire, hanging out with Victor Davis Hanson. I have no idea what the real guy looks like, and it was not like in the dream he was all "yadda hadda Bush Churchill Scipio Africanus Islamofascism blah blah," but that's who he was identified as. (At some point in the middle of all that, I found myself in a very, um, non-Euclidian version of the south of France, with Tom A and a bunch of his friends.)

Maybe it was because I finished that bruschetta pizza, and also finshed off the leftover pork tenderloin...

Wikipedia Featured Article: Well, look who made the list! Next up, Nobel Prize.

My friends are off to Moab, leaving today and leaving me behind... feeling kind of blue about it, but not as much as I expected -- woulda been nice though. Tonight Joe C is doing the designated driver thing, chauffering around the wives who were left behind on their "ladies night out." I got an invite to join the fun (George Hrab show at Godfrey Daniels) but I think I'll just get myself down to Which Brew.

Who's That Knocking At My Door?

I was looking at my "security logs" the other day, noticed that every few days someone tries to to log into my computer as "root" from the internet (via SSH), tries to guess the root account password, gets shot down and moves on. It looks like it's coming from different internet addresses each time. I'm not sure if it's someone just screwing around (or multiple people), or if it's one or more malware programs randomly sniffing around the internet for unlocked doors.

I don't have many internet-type services running on my machine; other than mail and a web server, which are both blocked from outside use by my firewall, the only one is the SSH server. That is accessible from the outside, and I want to leave it open, but I think I'm going to lock it down a little tighter: no root access, no access using only passwords. Luckily, I have that new book that tells me how to do exactly that...

Didn't go out last night, by the way, just stayed home with the computer and the leftover bruschetta pizza.

My Hump

Went out last night, down to Emmaus for dinner with Brian. This was that "charity dinner" at the Italian restaurant next to South Mountain Cycles: 20% of the bill went to Mark T to help defray his (ininsured) medical bills following his bike crash. It wasn't really an organized event, you just presented your flyer to them so they knew that's why you were there, and they did the rest. We saw Janna & Eric, and her parents, and Kris and her parents, and a few other PPRAC riders and various other riders there... also saw Mark, who had on a neck brace, and had some discoloration on his forehead but seemed to be in pretty good shape. Not too shabby, considering that he landed on his face, broke his nose & had all sorts of facial lacerations as well as some broken vertebrae & a "non-weight-bearing" fracture in his hip. We exchanged war stories, and despite how well he looked I think he got it a lot worse than I did.

Brian and I subsequently did our share, an antipasto each, followed by two medium pizzas: bruschetta pizza was yummy, the buffalo chicken pizza, not so much. (Brian liked them both.) We gave till it hurt, ordered way too much food, and now I have most of a bruschetta pizza at home on my "to eat list."

Geekout: I see that the Mozilla Foundation donated ten grand to help out OpenBSD/OpenSSH -- good for them! (FYI, that's the flavor of ssh that I use.) Meantime, I took a "How Geeky Are You" quiz last night, got 36 out of 60. It was a poorly implemented quiz, each question -- and they were mainly about gadget-consumerism and media consumption -- on its own web page, reloading advertisements etc each time. That's how I knew I'm not a true geek: I stuck it out, all the way to the annoying end. Looks like I'm not the only one to be less than impressed...

Tonight, if I can handle another food assault, is Mug Club Night at Which Brew.

Thermidor, Tristero Redux

My metabolism has slowed down quite a bit, I now get chilled in just about any situation. Last night I was playing with the computer right after getting home, and I just stopped and climbed into bed, shivering under the covers because I was so cold/lethargic/sleepy. About a half hour of napping and I decided to get up and start moving around. I did a few sets of exercises, maybe a half hour of leg lifts and light-weight, hi-rep upper body stuff, and I was fully warmed up and energized; that's got me through dinner and the rest of the evening. I guess I'll have to remember to keep the home fires going...

Through the Network, Darkly: Saw today that Freenet has just put out a new release.

It's Not Just A Month Of Meat

Try a little tenderloin: Cooked up some pork tenderloin tonight for dinner, pre-marinated in sa peppercorn sauce, one big piece, or half the package that I bought -- it took forever to cook, twice as long as the directions said, and I was done eating everything else before I even cut up the meat, but it was gooooood... I also made some steamed broccoli and some steamed asparagus, quite a bit of both actually since they were both in danger of going bad, and I had to get rid of them. All those veggies meant that I was stuffed when the meat was ready: I planned on eating half of what I cooked but I could only eat a quarter of it. At that rate it'll take four days to eat what I already cooked, then another four days for the other half of my purchase (still have a bunch of veggies to plow through as well), then there's a pot roast defrosting in the fridge (almost a week's worth of food), plus a bunch of pork chops (another week), as well as two pounds of beef stewing meat (a week of chili), in the freezer -- I figure I can eat like crazy, and I won't have to buy more meat for at least another month. (I heard that protein is very important for bone regeneration -- or was it kidney failure?)

Linux Voyager, Hush Now: Started messing with ssh, trying things I saw in that new book I got. I wish there were more places I could use it, since it's pretty interesting, but all I can connect to is SDF.

Reading: All the Pretty Horses, first book in the Border Trilogy. So far so good...

Back on the Sauce

Fifteen days until the cast comes off, two weeks from tomorrow.

So, what's new since late last night? Not much! Appetite seems to be on the wane again; I had a bowl of cereal instead of dinner last night. Dinner tonight will be pork tenderloin & some steamed veggies; tomorrow is a trip to Emmaus for a charity pizza dinner (20% going to help with cyclist/mechanic Mark Taylor's medical expenses, after his own -- uninsured -- cycling crash), then Wednesday will be the day I cook that pot roast. That's the plan anyway.

Skin Condition, Code Red: The skin had a real turn for the worse late last week, very likely caused by a change in moisturizer. Similar situation had occured a few weeks ago, the common factor, between the two different new moisturizers, being the term "non-comodogenic" or something, which apparently means it won't block pores -- whatever makes it "non-comodogenic" also makes it extremely irritating for me. Anyway, I got rid of that stuff ASAP and am back on the good old Vaseline Advanced Healing regimen, and things are already better, though the improvement could have been due to the sunning I got yesterday.

An Enigma Wrapped Inside a Riddle, Breaded And Fried

Little bit of an early birthday present, got some books from my Amazon wishlist -- thanks Mom & Dad! What I got was Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, Cormac McCarthy's Border trilogy (as a single volume), and SSH, The Secure Shell: The Definitive Guide, an O'Reilly computer book. They came Friday, and totally screwed up my weekend...

The first one I read was In Cold Blood; I wanted to read this before seeing that new (sorta new) movie Capote, which is at least partly about how writing this particular book ate him up. I started reading this Friday night, and it was so riveting I sat and read about two thirds of the book before getting up -- it was after 2:00 AM when I went into the kitchen for a class of juice, so I forced myself to go to bed. Saturday was the gym in the morning, then I came home and finished the book. Like I said, riveting.

Went out last night to Which Brew (they had Decadence on tap) with Doug and Lori, also saw Eric and Kris when they arrived later. Kind of neat to get Lori's take on Capote, since she's a big Breakfast At Tiffany's fan. Meantime, Kris had just come back from Philly, where she saw that Body Worlds exhibit with a friend, and she had a few tales to tell about that.

Today I got up a little late, in fact I got up a little later because of the "spring ahead" thing, spent a chunk of the early afternoon reading the SSH guide. Lotta good info in there, I already see some things I want to do to improve my own use of ssh. Kind of funny to be delving into encryption and secure transmissions right now, total synchronicity when I see that an Enigma machine is now up for sale on eBay. (The actual eBay link is here.)

I did my reading on the porch, got a little sun & air on the long-suffering epidermis; later in the day Eric came by and helped me with some shopping, that and a trip to the Quadrant for some coffee.

Nothing For A Man To Do But Sit Around And Think

Finished off the pork & sauerkraut last night, and the night before was the last of the chili. Tonight I may go out, or maybe I'll cook up some tuna w/ wilted greens. Right now I have a ton of food at home to choose from...

Linux Voyager, Next Port Of Call: I'm thinking of upgrading my system completely from the ground up, since right now I sort of have a jury-rigged version of Red Hat 8 (which was superseded several years ago by RH 9, then Red Hat moved all their non-enterprise to Fedora, and RH 9 was superseded by Fedora Core 1, 2, 3, 4 and I think version 5 was just released), anyway, I think it might be a good idea to just bring the entire system up to date in one shot. I'm thinking of trying Ubuntu, a new distribution that's generated a lot of positive buzz.

Meme, Meme, Roses Are Red

Saw this post about Eugene O'Neill, and the post's title really stuck with me. I remember the song from when I was a kid, but the song that eventually got stuck in my head because of it -- all morning long, and counting -- is "Georgie Girl."

Went out last night with Doug & Lori. They took me to the drycleaner, then we tried getting down to Nature's Way but it was closed so we went to Porter's for dinner. Completely unrelated, but I had trouble sleeping last night from about 1:00 on (went to bed around 10:00), and woke up tired this morning. Long day so far...

Please Christmas, Don't Be Late

Cast comes off three weeks from today. Not that I'm counting the days or anything, just sayin'...

Made "Bavarian Pork Chops" (ie pork and sauerkraut) yesterday in the crock pot: prepped it Sunday night, tossed it in the fridge & put it on the heater before going to work. I was a little worried, since I used "pork lumps" (apparently meant for kebabs, since they came with little skewers) instead of chops, prepped everything before the meat was fully defrosted, and added celery, carrots & potatoes to the book recipe; I was a little skeptical about the smell before it got cooking -- it kind of smelled like bad cabbage when I took it out of the fridge. When I got home last night however, the whole house smelled great, and I immediately made myself a plate, and it tasted as good as it smelled.

I was planning to play on the computer after dinner, but I was so tired and sleepy I was in bed by 7:00. I'd been up late the night before, poking away at the 'puter, bored and desultory browsing long past the point of diminishing returns, so I figure the sleep was a better idea than the internet last night.

Kickass!

Twenty-four days until the cast comes off...

Went out yesterday, took a taxi downtown to do some errands: first stop was to the bank, make sure all funds were in order between my checking accounts, then it was off to the gym. Dawn set up a very serious "lighter weights but high reps" upper body workout, focusing mainly on my chest and shoulders (w/ plenty of other stuff as well), and it beat me into the ground -- but it was a good kind of hurt! I really needed that, it made me feel normal again.

With a little help from my friends: Brian helped me with laundry on Friday -- he picked me up & drove back to his house to dry clothes, we went to Which Brew for dinner while the laundry dried, then we went back, through a DWI checkpoint, to pick up my my clothes. Then, I got a call yesterday morning from Kris, asking if I needed anything while she was running her Saturday errands. She's out the other end of the Valley and I had Greg & Judy on tap for groceries in the afternoon, so I thanked her & took a raincheck. (By the way, her chili is better than mine. I'm working on it...)

Greg & Judy took me to the supermarket in the afternoon; they got a few things for themselves and I got another big order. (I have to say that they have the shopping thing down to a science.)

Since Doug helped me with drycleaning and also picked up a few necessities the other day, I am now very far from hurting on the domestic front. Hopefully, nobody'll ever need this kind of help, but when or if the time comes, they all have some major chips they can cash in with me.

Anyway, today looks reasonably nice out, though probably cold: I may go for a walk later in the afternoon but in the meantime there's breakfast and the internet.

Staying Focused

I'm starting to feel a little more comfortable in the cast, in fact I accidentally tried walking twice in the past two days. I'd be sitting or whatever, and I'd go reach for something, and just get up and got to take a step -- doh! Let it heal, don't break it again, remember you're in a cast...

Been working out a little bit as well. I've been doing mostly upper body stuff with light dumbbells, but have also added leg lifts, leg extensions and "bicycles." I think it's actually been very helpful, especially for the comfort situation: blood flow seems much improved during and after the workout, and the metabolism boost has helped with the constant lethargic/chilly feeling I've been having lately. I will be going to the gym tomorrow, for the first time since the crash.

Chili, Urp: Ate the last of my crockpot chili last night, just to get rid of it so I can clean the pot, and also a piece of baked stuffed tofu. Admittedly a strange combo, but it worked for me.

Terra Incognita, beyond the Linux Voyage: I started messing around with TOPS-20 again, over at twenex.org. This time around, I've armed myself with some documentation, and seem to be doing quite a bit better -- at least, now when things don't work, I can find out why.

I was thinking of going out tonight, some friends are going to see the Philadelphia Funk Authority in Quakertown and I planned on joining them, but now I'm starting to feel a little tired and will probably beg off. Tomorrow's another evening out...

Wow, Doldrums Already

Well, that honeymoon didn't last long... the workday flew by yesterday, but today the time has gone back to dragging. I think I kind of romanticized work when I couldn't come in, and now the reality of indoor pollution, loud & annoying co-workers, and (most important) no nap time has settled in like a dark cloud.

It's what's for dinner: Earlier in the week I made a crock pot of chili, and so I've had chili every night since. I can no longer stand chili. Unfortunately, I have one more night to go in the crock pot -- and also, a friend's wife made me some when she heard I was hurt. I got some more chili to eat before I'm done, but I think tonight I'll make tuna & wilted greens just to keep my sanity.

OK, Back To Work!

My first day back after two and a half weeks, and it feels like I never left...

Not much to say: it's lunchtime right now, had to get a friend to carry my tray but things were pretty normal otherwise, same old food anyway... Morning was spent talking to friends & explaining what happened, and talking to the people who did my work while was gone, and just getting back up to speed here. Now I'm back in the swing of things, not even a problem getting used to it.

The Party's Over

And not a minute too soon, I might add...

My parents came up this morning (my dad also limping, from tendonitis) and took me to the doctor, where I got the staples removed from my leg and, after satisfactory x-ray results, got my new permanent cast -- semi-permanent, that is, since it's coming off only four weeks from today, I even have the appointment already. Sweet! (You can see me get the cast in my latest flickr photos.)

That means that I now have a clean bill of health, and can go back to work starting tomorrow...

Spent the day/evening yesterday playing with the computer. Dinner last night was chili, which I ate just after Doug came by & helped me with some errands. This afternoon was spent mostly sleeping.

Linux Voyager, Smooth Sailing: I downloaded and compiled the latest Mplayer, something I'd been meaning to do for a while, since newer versions of various video formats have left me in the backwaters of planned obsolescence. Got it up and running, no problems, and it worked well with the new formats, but I still liked Xine (my old standard for MPEG/wmv viewing) better even though the interface is kind of clunky... So, on a whim I set Xine to use the new codecs that came with Mplayer, and now Xine also works perfectly with the new formats. Like I said, sweet!

It's Beginning To Smell A Lot Like Chili

All through the house... The chili has been cooking since about 10:30, should be ready by 5:00 or 6:00, and it smells pretty good despite some expedients I had to take (I had no diced tomatoes, so I used tomato soup, which was a fancy kind with parmesan cheese in it). Like I said, it should be ready in an hour or so; too bad I have like zero appetite right now.

So while that's been cooking I've been reading (see previous post), playing on the computer, and also I went and cancelled my Moab flight plans: four separate phone calls (Travelocity, Travelocity flight insurance, regular Travelocity again, and finally Continental), the final call consisting of 40 minutes on hold followed by one minute of transaction, but it's done. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out how to do this online, and believe me I was motivated. (I swear, these guys compartmentalize the process so much, like they run from any responsibilities, other than their most strictly routine, and no doubt legally mandated ones like actually flying the plane, as soon as they have your money. If a travel company could or would provide full service, cradle-to-grave care for your trip, I think they would own the industry in a year.)

Linux Voyager, Tossing Things Overboard: I noticed that my hard drive was 50% full the other day (rather, my main partition on the hard drive, which uses 29G of the available 40G, was 50% full). This freaked me out, I couldn't believe that there was so mch stuff on my machine... what it turned out to be, was that almost every time I upgraded some software, I kept the old version in case the new one didn't work out, and I kept the compressed files for the new version in case I had to re-do the upgrade, so each iteration (and I kept them all) would dump another 20-30 megs on my hard drive -- 20 megs here, 20 mwegs there, pretty soon that adds up to real storage... So what I did was park about 1.5 gigabytes of essentials in my 5G "dead storage" partition, then erase about 3 more gigs of old versions of Mozilla etc. I was a little worried at first -- as in, immediately after I pressed the "OK" button -- that I may have left a few library files in among the archives, like say maybe only putting links to the archived ones in my current system, so instead of having a "flash" plugin (for instance), I'd only have a broken link. (I was especially worried about Mozilla, since I'd played fast-and-loose with the initial install, and every subsequent upgrade, and I no longer remember all my clever-stupid shortcuts.) Things seem to still work OK though, so I guess that wasn't the case. Phew, and now I'm back to a more comfortable 35%-full main partition, so I'm downloading more stuff as we speak.

Hoppy, The One-Legged Bookworm

Apparently, Blogger is buggered right now (Sunday night), so I'm just typing this up for later, will post "for real" when they get their act back together...

Been doing a lot of reading lately. I just finished a re-read of Infinite Jest, which I didn't think I could bear to read again -- it's good, but does not end on an emotional high note -- and I'm glad I did: I picked up a lot more that I missed the last (two) times I read it, and I feel it was definitely worth the effort. I happen to have been reading David Foster Wallace's book of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and it's amazing the parallels I see between the essays and Infinite Jest. Kind of funny, there are also somewhat disturbing ankle/surgery parallels between my recent life and the book, let's hope they go no further...

After that I picked up Cloud Atlas for a re-read, but I'm just picking: I'm really only interested in the second section of "An Orison of Sonmi-451." I'll probably go through it all anyway, but in the meantime I've been re-reading that anthology of Outside Magazine's best articles from their first 20 years. That works out nicely; each article, essay or story is just a bite-sized chunk, already perfect for book-nibbling.

Those Outside articles got me hankering for some more outdoor reading though, and I felt like a little nonfiction, so I just started up Cadillac Desert. Again, I think I'll just graze, skipping the less interesting chapters to just hit the stuff I like, even though I've already plowed through the Introduction and the first few chapters. (If I feel like fiction I may pick up Blood Meridian again as well, but that's kind of a fast read.)

Anyway, real life: went out again last night, back to Which Brew for dinner with my friend Greg. It was not quite as bad an ordeal as the night before (understandable, what with the St Patrick's day celebrations & whatnot), and this time I got chairs for both myself and my foot. One good thing about this whole ankle debacle is that I've actually lost about 10 pounds, even with the splint on my foot, and I think it's mainly due to the sudden drop-off in beer and bar food consumption, so I have somewhat mixed feelings about getting back out there... Saw Doug Hawke's new band; they sounded pretty good.

Other than that, nothing much is going on. I spent at least part of the day researching and pricing laptops, and I just prepared a crock pot of chili, put it in the fridge for cooking tomorrow.

I see that blogger's back, so I'll just slap this post down and then it's off to bed.